Capital Expenditures Structure, Cost of Capital and Shareholders' Wealth

Financing with reasonable cost, correct usage of capital and preventing the creation of unused resources are the financial management’s most important tasks. Appropriate financing and correct investment in assets leads to sustainable growth in shareholders’ wealth. This study was carried out to investigate the relationship between the capital expenditures structure (CES) and the cost of capital with shareholders’ wealth. Using systematic sampling in a five years period, 186 companies, including the listed companies in Tehran Stock Exchange were selected. To analyze data, Partial Least Squares method of Structural Equation Modeling was used. The findings indicated that there is a significant positive relationship between the CES and shareholders’ wealth in total, but some components of the CES are not related to shareholders’ wealth and it is necessary to be studied carefully. Because, understanding the relationship between the CES and shareholders’ wealth is very important to maximize shareholders’ wealth and will be most effective in capital expenditures’ budgeting. Also, there is a significant inverse relationship between the cost of capital and shareholders’ wealth

Crowdsourcing for web genre annotation

Recently, genre collection and automatic genre identification for the web has attracted much attention. However, currently there is no genre-annotated corpus of web pages where inter-annotator reliability has been established, i.e. the corpora are either not tested for inter-annotator reliability or exhibit low inter-coder agreement. Annotation has also mostly been carried out by a small number of experts, leading to concerns with regard to scalability of these annotation efforts and transferability of the schemes to annotators outside these small expert groups. In this paper, we tackle these problems by using crowd-sourcing for genre annotation, leading to the Leeds Web Genre Corpus—the first web corpus which is, demonstrably reliably annotated for genre and which can be easily and cost-effectively expanded using naive annotators. We also show that the corpus is source and topic diverse

Religious Tourism Development Strategies in Qom Province: Using and Comparing QSPM and Best Worst Methods

After Mashhad county, Qom province has the most valuable religious, cultural, historical and natural potential as the second Iranian pilgrimage centre. This study was conducted to formulate strategies for the development of religious tourism in Qom province using the most influential view of the strategy-formation process named design school. This school normally uses External Factor Evaluation (EFE) Matrix, Internal Factor Evaluation (IFE) Matrix, SWOT Matrix, QSPM matrix, and some other tools. The strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats were determined using IFE and EFE matrices. The SWOT matrix was prepared and then the proper strategies for the development of religious tourism in Qom province (hold and maintain strategies or ST strategies) were determined using the Internal-External (IE) Matrix in the next step. Extracted ST strategies were prioritised using the QSPM and five strategies were proposed respectively. This study used the Best-Worst Method (BWM) to prioritise the created strategies in addition to QSPM this aims at developing strategic planning methodology. The results of the BWM were compared to the QSPM and the priority of the second and third strategies were modified. The priority of the first, fourth and fifth strategies is the same in the two methods. Moreover, the correlation coefficient between the results of the two methods was calculated. This shows a similarity of approximately 95 percent. So, it seems using the BWM method is more cost-effective than QSPM, due to saving time and cost

Human Annotation and Automatic Detection of Web Genres

Texts differ from each other in various dimensions such as topic, sentiment, authorship and genre. In this thesis, the dimension of text variation of interest is genre. Unlike topic classification, genre classification focuses on the functional purpose of documents and classifies them into categories such as news, review, online shop, personal home page and conversational forum. In other words, genre classification allows the identification of documents that are similar in terms of purpose, even they are topically very diverse. Research on web genres has been motivated by the idea that finding information on the web can be made easier and more effective by automatic classification techniques that differentiate among web documents with respect to their genres. Following this idea, during the past two decades, researchers have investigated the performance of various genre classification algorithms in order to enhance search engines. Therefore, current web automatic genre identification research has resulted in several genre annotated web-corpora as well as a variety of supervised machine learning algorithms on these corpora. However, previous research suffers from shortcomings in corpus collection and annotation (in particular, low human reliability in genre annotation), which then makes the supervised machine learning results hard to assess and compare to each other as no reliable benchmarks exist. This thesis addresses this shortcoming. First, we built the Leeds Web Genre Corpus Balanced-design (LWGC-B) which is the first reliably annotated corpus for web genres, using crowd-sourcing for genre annotation. This corpus which was compiled by focused search method, overcomes the drawbacks of previous genre annotation efforts such as low inter-coder agreement and false correlation between genre and topic classes. Second, we use this corpus as a benchmark to determine the best features for closed-set supervised machine learning of web genres. Third, we enhance the prevailing supervised machine learning paradigm by using semi-supervised graph-based approaches that make use of the graph-structure of the web to improve classification results. Forth, we expanded our annotation method successfully to Leeds Web Genre Corpus Random (LWGC-R) where the pages to be annotated are collected randomly by querying search engines. This randomly collected corpus also allowed us to investigate coverage of the underlying genre inventory. The result shows that our 15 genre categories are sufficient to cover the majority but not the vast majority of the random web pages. The unique property of the LWGC-R corpus (i.e. having web pages that do not belong to any of the predefined genre classes which we refer to as noise) allowed us to, for the first time, evaluate the performance of an open-set genre classification algorithm on a dataset with noise. The outcome of this experiment indicates that automatic open-set genre classification is a much more challenging task compared to closed-set genre classification due to noise. The results also show that automatic detection of some genre classes is more robust to noise compared to other genre classes

The Heat Conduction Renaissance

Some of the most exciting recent advancements in heat conduction physics have been motivated, enabled, or achieved by the thermal management community that ITherm serves so effectively. In this paper we highlight the resulting renaissance in basic heat conduction research, which is linked to cooling challenges from power transistors to portables. Examples include phonon transport and scattering in nanotransistors, engineered high-conductivity composites, modulated conductivity through phase transitions, as well as the surprising transport properties of low-dimensional (1D and 2D) nanomaterials. This work benefits strongly from decades of collaboration and leadership from the semiconductor industry.Comment: Invited perspective presented at the 17th IEEE ITherm conference in San Diego (30th May 2018) on occasion of the Richard Chu ITherm Award for Excellence given to Prof. Kenneth Goodso

The Relationship between Financial Statements Disaggregation and Audit Fees

This paper studies the relationship between financial statements disaggregation and audit fees. Financial statements disaggregation is about detailed disclosure of information and is based on the better quality of finer information. To measure this characteristic, native standards and resources (from Iran) were used. Our method of measurement is based on Chen et al.’s (2015) approach, but with a basis of local resources. Providing more detailed information in the financial statements can affect the auditors’ judgment regarding audit scope, which can affect their demanded fee. The results indicate that there is a significant relationship between financial statements disaggregation and audit fees

Capital Expenditures Structure, Cost of Capital and Shareholders' Wealth

Financing with reasonable cost, correct usage of capital and preventing the creation of unused resources are the financial management’s most important tasks. Appropriate financing and correct investment in assets leads to sustainable growth in shareholders’ wealth. This study was carried out to investigate the relationship between the capital expenditures structure (CES) and the cost of capital with shareholders’ wealth. Using systematic sampling in a five years period, 186 companies, including the listed companies in Tehran Stock Exchange were selected. To analyze data, Partial Least Squares method of Structural Equation Modeling was used. The findings indicated that there is a significant positive relationship between the CES and shareholders’ wealth in total, but some components of the CES are not related to shareholders’ wealth and it is necessary to be studied carefully. Because, understanding the relationship between the CES and shareholders’ wealth is very important to maximize shareholders’ wealth and will be most effective in capital expenditures’ budgeting. Also, there is a significant inverse relationship between the cost of capital and shareholders’ wealth

An in vitro study on the antibacterial effects of chlorhexidine-loaded positively charged silver nanoparticles on Enterococcus faecalis

This study successfully developed a positively charged silver nanocomplex as a nanocarrier for chlorhexidine (CHX) using ionic liquids. This nanocomplex can interestingly deliver the antibacterial agent with a synergistic effect. In this study, we synthetized and characterized a positively charged silver nanocomplex (AgNPs+) and CHX-loaded positively charged silver nanoparticles (CHX@AgNPs+) using UV-visible spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, X-ray diffractometer, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and Zetasizer. Then, the loading efficiency and release profile of XHX from nanocomplex were evaluated. The antibacterial activity was evaluated by employing two standard microdilution tests to obtain the minimum bactericidal and inhibitory concentrations. The average sizes of 27.43 nm and 29.66 nm were obtained for AgNPs+ and CHX@AgNPs+, respectively. The CHX@AgNPs+ showed a constant release of CHX, making them a more effective antibacterial agent against Enterococcus faecalis (E. faecalis) than CHX or AgNPs+ alone. Antibacterial assays showed that CHX@AgNPs+ significantly reduced the viability of the bacterial strain compared to CHX as the standard irrigant. AgNPs+ had an antibacterial effect similar to CHX only at intermediate concentrations (12 and 25 μg/mL), and their effects were significantly less than those of CHX at other concentrations (3, 6, 50, and 100 μg/mL). The effects of CHX@AgNPs+ were statistically greater than those of AgNPs+ at all concentrations tested. The MIC values of CHX@AgNPs+ and CHX were 50 and 100 μg/mL. However, AgNPs+ were not showed MIC value at tested concentrations. Therefore, the designed nanocomplex can be regarded as a potential root canal disinfectant with clinical applications for bacterial infections